I get the desire for a centralized location but I was hoping Lemmy would be the spot. Forums just seen so fragmented, it's nice to go to one place to see all the discussion instead of having several subpages which honestly have little action. https://lemmy.ml/c/jellyfin seemed like the best replacement for r/Jellyfin
As someone who had to Google a bunch of docker issues and constantly got redirected to locked down subreddits, I'm all for developers hosting their own communities. At least then they have an incentive to keep the communities alive.
Absolutely agree that hiding knowledge behind a paywall is crappy. I hit that issue so many times with Red Hat that I standardized on debian variants.
Searching, while a function of any modern forum, is easily bypassed with a modern search engine / crawler. Unless the forum admin takes the unlikely step of disabling web crawlers on their site, you can pass the site:<website> filter into your search. For example: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=subtitles+site%3Aforum.jellyfin.org&ia=web shows forum posts regarding subtitles.
Chats are not forums. Discord is the same bullcrap than Reddit and Facebook, just newer on the enshittification cycle. People should just have forums and someone could make a containerized microservice that federates it to Activity Hub. Now it's searchable, indexable, publicly available and archivable.
Jellyfin is open sourced and supported by donations. I've used it for around a year and I can confirm there have been no fees, tracking, or anything else.
I'm guessing you don't have much experience with FOSS software. It's volunteer driven, with a set of passionate maintainors at the helm. Much like Linux.